Song For Rexdale

Time was like perfume. Sunshine had flown.
Ran into the arms of the evening’s cologne.
The streetlights were the gold eyes of a cat.

The factory roads with their old and black lungs
joined in on the chorus

of songs that we sung.
I can still smell that refrain.

We’re gonna get high, high, high.

The night is young.

Sweet Berry Creek was a vein in the arm
of the milkmaid who laid her hand on the farm
until all the farmhands lined up to dance.
The paint plant stood with its fountainhead grin,
pissed rainbows all over the young river’s skin.
I was up to my hips, made a dam with her hair.
The Humber River’s my snake in the grass.
I’m still waiting for its childhood to pass
and shed its skin into the lake.
The streets cut your back like a fisherman’s net,
had names of the cousins of a stranger we met
by a cave on the sea in a boat.

Martin Grove Road is a spine I still trace
with a finger from her foot to her face
and place my palm on her Heatherglen.
The maples that stand like sentinels spied
on the lives and the lies of games that we tried.
She’d still be a sapling come spring.
We prayed over bones of a second-rate saint.
The wind was the colour of penance and paint.
I stained the glass with the questions they told me to eat.
We hid and went seeking for someone to find –
the broken, unforgettable kind.
We hid with the day until somebody’d sing.